For a pair of sun-burnished, 6ft 2in PhD student Olympic gold medal favourite water goddesses, Katherine Grainger and Anna Watkins also appear to be alarmingly modest. "What? Who? Us?" is Grainger's response to being told that the world champion double scullers have been installed as No1 contenders in the Guardian's pre-Olympic British medal contender table, a ranking system devised via a cross-disciplinary expert panel.

"I'm very pleased. And very flattered," Watkins says, as the pair take a break from training and injury rehab – Watkins has recently recovered from back problems – at the Berkshire stronghold of British rowing, the Redgrave Pinsent training lake. "I don't know if it was a factor in drawing up the list, but coming through the injury I think has really strengthened us. We know we can win when things are going well and when things are going badly."

Scanning down the Team GB contenders, Grainger continues to protest politely. Phillips Idowu, Jessica Ennis ("leagues ahead of everyone else") and assorted cyclists are all championed, but really it is an exercise that serves only to emphasise their own unarguable eminence.

Watkins and Grainger are seriously good: described by one journalist as "the Usain Bolts" of the women's double sculls, they are still unbeaten more than a year into their partnership. It is a remarkable record, made all the more fascinating by the indefinables of the double sculls, where success is born out of technical refinement and also an intangible athletic bond, an ability to row and react with double‑skulled synchronicity.

Even in the semi-formal surroundings of the Team GB press marquee there is a waspish chemistry between the pair, and an air of almost marital delicacy when the subject is broached of Grainger's recent outings with alternative partners during Watkins' recent injury break. "I didn't want to," Grainger says. "The way we row and the way we are together is very, very special. You're not going to leave that easily. I wasn't looking around thinking, right, what am I going to do now?"

It is a partnership that has been timely for both women. At 34 Grainger is a five‑times world champion and already an eminent Olympian, albeit one whose post‑Beijing persistence is rooted in a hunger to add a gold medal to three silvers. Watkins is eight years younger, an emerging powerhouse who, six years after graduating from Cambridge University where her physique first led her into rowing, has only relatively recently felt settled in the British team. Like a champion rugby union centre pairing, or a telepathic striking duo, partnership has elevated both to new levels of excellence.

"We find communication in the boat incredibly easy," Watkins says. "It can just be a word. You get people who approach racing with a fear of failure and people like us who feel excitement about success. I just feel there's never any tension."

This is no doubt a good thing with the generational iceberg of a home Olympics looming ever closer through the mist. Nobody really knows what effects the extreme pressures of London 2012 will wreak on our athletes. As gold medal favourites in a discipline that is locked into the defining four-yearly Olympic cycle, the forces of expectation will be at their most crushing for Watkins and Grainger. Happily the pair – who have three degrees and two ongoing PhDs between them – are among the more reflective of elite athletes. You sense they will cope.

"I'm sure on the morning of the race there's going to be an absolute cauldron of terror going on," Watkins says. "This far out you just feel the excitement. We both have the psychology where we need to be excited rather than terrified and it will be a challenge to manage that."

Grainger adds: "The thing it's hard to get across is how emotional it is. I've seen some of the toughest male athletes in our team in tears the night before Olympic finals. Everything's coming together for that moment, your whole career. How on earth do you deal with that? Plus we've got a home crowd that we've never had before, 33,000 people sold out every day. People don't see the agony, the pain and the exhaustion. Sport is about those incredible moments when you get six and a half minutes to try to get the result you've put in years and years of effort for."

With rowing all set to form a major narrative strand once again in the British Olympic story, Watkins and Grainger are also good news for those who protest at its air of Thames Valley elitism, the sense of an equipment-heavy closed shop.

"We're both state educated," Grainger says before the question of social elitism can even be fully mumbled forth. Grainger went to Bearsden Academy in Glasgow, alma mater of the Everton manager, David Moyes, and Alex Kapranos from Franz Ferdinand. Watkins is from starry Leek.

"You've got the Boat Race and you've got Henley and that's what everybody sees, but the reality isn't like that," Grainger says. "For us it's about absolute elite performance on the international stage and nothing else."

In their own field Watkins and Grainger are the elite. Asked who they fear most ahead of 2012 there is a courteous but slightly vague struggle to locate an overwhelmingly terrifying opponent.

"The Australians have been the closest to us so far," Grainger says. "The Germans are always strong. But really we want them all to be worrying about us instead."